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Iron Street Farm Growing Produce, Communities and Opportunity

October 21, 2013|By Leigh Hanlon | Tribune Content Agency

Ask Tyres Walker what Iron Street Farm is all about, and the guy won’t mince words: “We’re changing the world.

The 21-year-old resident of Chicago’s South Side came to the farm through Chicago Youth Corps, which offers academic and work experience to young people from low-income backgrounds. Youth Corps supporters include the City of Chicago’s After School Matters and Heifer Project International.

Iron Street Farm, located at 3333 S. Iron St. in Chicago’s Bridgeport community, is run by Growing Power, an urban-farming nonprofit organization founded in Milwaukee two decades ago.

On its 7-acre former industrial site here, the farm features outdoor and indoor gardens, hoop houses (greenhouses), the initial stages of a fish-farming operation, teaching spaces and plenty of room for special projects ranging from bicycle repair to the creation of goat-milk soap. The farm’s bounty is sold at farmers markets and selected retailers — and to chefs like Paul Virant, who showcases locally grown produce at his restaurants Vie in Western Springs and Perennial Virant in Lincoln Park.

Iron Street Farm currently has a full-time staff of 16, many hired after completing Youth Corps or internship programs.

According to Laurell Sims, production manager for Growing Power’s Chicago operation, this year’s programs involved 45 teens during spring, 210 over the summer, and 70 during the current fall term. Participants gain experience in growing-bed construction, planting, harvesting, marketing, cooking and nutrition.

Walker first participated through Youth Corps three years ago, but is now an employee and is passing on what he’s learned to a new group of students, including healthy eating, building hoop houses, layering compost, pretty much “learning how to do everything,” in Walker’s words.

In addition to teaching, his other responsibilities include composting, giving tours of the farm, tending, marketing and selling the farm’s produce — and even wrangling the beehives on the roof of the farm’s central building, a once-shuttered and now-repurposed distribution facility

Youthful curiosity leads to farm

Employee Malcolm Evans has been associated with Growing Power since he was 9 or 10 years old. Evans says that when he lived in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, he became fascinated with “a small farm” planted close to his building and operated by Growing Power.

“At that time, I was very young,” the 20-year-old West Side resident says. “I wanted to learn about food and to meet new people.”

Evans says that when people ask whether he’s happy as a farmer, he stresses the tangible rewards of each step in the process. “There’s a satisfaction in growing, harvesting and selling produce,” he says.

And that’s quite a change for Evans. “When I was young, I didn’t really eat vegetables or know much about them.” Like Walker, today his responsibilities range over much of the farm’s operations.

“But this isn’t just work,” he emphasizes. “It’s education. We’re here to teach kids how to run a farm.”

Seeds of success

Growing Power, the brainchild of former Procter & Gamble marketer Will Allen, sprouted in Milwaukee in 1993. After success there with its emphasis on local, healthy and sustainable food year-round and training vulnerable populations, the organization set its sights on Chicago.

There’s even a partnership with Chicago-based Working Bikes, which teaches teens basic bicycle repair, navigation and how to safely transport produce by bike cart.

“A lot of programs work with youth and challenging populations, and they execute according to their contract,” explains Erika Allen, Growing Power’s Chicago and national project director. “But we decided to design a program that was solving the symptom as well as addressing the problem.”

She says the Chicago operation addresses historical economic inequity by making sure participants develop sought-after work skills, like the ability to solve problems. “Kind of all the things you want in a good employee,” Allen says. People who typically have been disenfranchised take the lead at Iron Street Farm, she notes. “The folks doing the work are becoming the experts because they’ve been doing it longer than those just coming in. … That story in itself is already creating a new space for achievement and progress within the community.”

Although Iron Street has been open at its Bridgeport site for three years, this is the first year the farm has been at full production. Crops raised here include tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, cucumbers, tomatillos, winter and summer squash, pumpkins, gourds, edible flowers and herbs, strawberries, mushrooms and golden raspberries. (Allen says the raspberries are especially delicious.) Two pygmy goats also are at the farm. Goat milk is used as an ingredient in specialty soaps.

According to production manager Sims, Iron Street has high hopes for its nascent aquaculture operation, which is raising yellow perch. She said they selected that species because a lot of other outfits are farming tilapia, which has become less sought after.

Yellow perch also is a regional favorite, being native to the Great Lakes, Sims says. “They’re harder to raise, but much more valuable economically.” Tilapia typically goes for about $5 a pound, while yellow perch brings in $28.

At the moment, Iron Street is selling customers the entire fish, which weighs about a pound and a half. At least for right now, customers are responsible for gutting and cleaning the perch and extracting the filet.

Looking to the future

In spring 2014, Growing Power is partnering with the City of Chicago and the Chicago Park District to create “Farmers for Chicago,” a program that will put from four to seven farmers on plots within a 14-acre South Side urban farm.

The idea is to get more farmers growing food, more places for them to sell their produce, and more folks in the community buying and eating affordable, healthy food. “We have all these people who want to buy local food,” Allen says. “But there aren’t enough people growing it — or food that’s affordable.”

Tyres Walker and Malcolm Evans could very well be the kind of entrepreneurs who are a part of that future. Both young men say they plan to stick to farming.

“I’d like to get my own land and build a sustainable food center in Chicago or wherever I am that doesn’t have locally grown food,” Walker says. “It’ll be organically grown — no pesticides or anything else. I also want to keep teaching kids how to eat properly and grow the food they eat.”